Statistics Denmark has conducted a special analysis for DR of everyone who has been granted Danish citizenship from 2018 to 2025 and subsequently violated the criminal code. 2018 was chosen as the starting year because it is the year when the Danish Parliament tightened the rules and excluded applicants permanently or for several years from obtaining citizenship if they commit crime.

Statistics Denmark has counted how many have violated the criminal code throughout the entire period. However, it is most common for people to violate the traffic law, and the analysis does not include that new citizens also receive speeding fines or penalty points on their driver’s license. Much of the debate about citizenship, however, concerns the more serious crime, so DR therefore looks at the criminal code.

In a table, Statistics Denmark has calculated how many people aged 15 and over have been convicted of violating the criminal code in the same year or the year after they received citizenship. The time period here is people who received citizenship from 2018 to 2024. If, for example, you receive citizenship in February, you have the opportunity to commit crime from February to December in that year – and also the following year.

To compare the figures, DR has extracted figures on convicted persons in the statistics bank aged 15–79 years (STRAFNA4) and compared them with the population in the same age group (FOLK2). In this way, one can see how many in the general population are convicted of crime in one year.

But the two periods are not the same, so when DR compares, it can look as if the population and Danes commit less crime than is actually the case. This is because the population is measured over a shorter period for violating the criminal code than people who have been granted citizenship.

Overall, however, this strengthens the conclusion: that new citizens violate the criminal code less than the general population.

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